What's This 'Internet' I Keep Hearing About? - Part One - Introduction

I thought i'd make some posts over the coming days all about the internet. It's what you're looking at right now reading this and it's what lets me communicate with you. I owe it a lot so i thought it would be good to pay it homage and do a series of posts on it. Check back every day to get the whole article.

To most people, the Internet is the place to which everyone plugs in their computer and views webpages and sends e-mail. That's a very human-centric viewpoint, but if we're to truly understand the Internet, we need to be more exact:
The Internet is THE large global computer network that people connect to by-default, by virtue of the fact that it's the largest. And, like any computer network, there are conventions that allow it to work.

This is all it is really - a very big computer network. However, this article will go beyond explaining just the Internet, as it will also explain the 'World Wide Web'. Most people don't know the difference between the Internet and Web, but really it's quite simple: the Internet is a computer network, and the Web is a system of publishing (of websites) for it.